As a developer and writer, my morning schedule is pretty much the same every day: I wake up at 5:00 AM, and I’m sitting in front of my monitor at 5:20 AM, enjoying my first cup of coffee while the radio plays in the background, my 16-year-old dog (Rex) snoring louder than Metallica, and I’m reading and answering your comments and emails. But today, I noticed something that just made my whole day.
Coding and maintaining an app like The Novelist is far from easy. You need a place where you can store everything, from your personal notes to bug reports, a roadmap, the feedback you’re getting, test cases, regression suites, release QA, dependency maps, audit reports, marketing strategies, and so much more that are basically behind-the-scenes stuff. And while there are many ways that you can do that, I personally prefer using Obsidian for this purpose, since its file-first approach is exactly what I need as a one-person show.
This morning, I launched Obsidian to see what was left to code before pushing The Novelist’s version v0.1.22 to all users. But before I started, I wanted to catch up with any news that I may have missed, and one of the places that I usually go for that is Reddit. That’s when I saw a user who posted their own Graph View from their Obsidian vault, and it was filled with tons of stuff – to be more exact, it looked like a whole galaxy. It quickly drew my attention, and since I never really look at my own Graph View in Obsidian, I went to see what mine looked like for The Novelist’s vault, which is… well… pretty huge by now.
That’s when I saw something that I’ve never seen before; my vault looks like a heart. Here, take a look for yourself:
If you’ve been reading me, either here, on my personal blog, or even through my Medium blog, you already know that I switched my career and closed my company to focus on my ultimate dream of becoming a sci-fi novelist. Because I couldn’t find a good worldbuilding and writing software that could handle the hundreds of characters, locations, and events I had, and I was done with switching between documents, apps, and sites, I started building my own app.
Since I was unemployed and money was running out, I started writing on Medium in the hopes that I’d be making at least a few bucks per month. I’m also living along with my father, so I can focus on building my app without having to worry about rent and reduce my monthly expenses since this is our home. One thing I wasn’t expecting was the support and love that I’ve gotten over the past few months. People donating and purchasing the Early Access version of The Novelist, one that’s not even ready yet.
The love and support completely changed me. It pushed me to work even harder and made me see that the past two years I’ve been working on it alone were well worth it. So you can understand how I felt when I saw that my Graph View for this app looked like a heart – like, has life finally given me a break? Is this life’s way of telling me that I’m doing something right? Who knows, but it did make my whole day and brought a smile to my face.
So, yeah, nothing special here, just something that I wanted to share with you all.
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